The dragon launched itself off the shattered deck of the barge.
It moved with the violence of a predator that had been caged for too long and was finally being given the chance to do what it had been bred for.
The sheer impossible speed of the thing was the first horror that struck the men on the beach. A creature of that size should not have been able to move that fast. It should have lumbered. It should have been slow. It should have given the small fragile men beneath it time to think, time to react, time to flee.
Instead the wyvern crossed the distance between the barge and the shoreline in three powerful wing-assisted bounds, each one sending up an enormous plume of seawater as its hind talons punched through the surface and found purchase on the seabed below, and by the time anyone on the beach had fully processed what they were seeing, the dragon was already on the sand among them.
The first man it took was a Gold Cloak who had paused in his retreat to look back over his shoulder.
The dragon's jaws closed around him from the waist up. It happened so quickly that the man did not even have time to scream. His legs and lower torso came away from the rest of him in a single wet tearing motion that sent a sheet of dark blood spraying out across the sand, and the dragon swung its head sideways with the bitten-off remains still clutched between its teeth and the legs and pelvis fell to the ground with the sound of meat hitting earth. The dragon shook its head once, twice, and the rest of the man slid down its throat.
That was when the screaming started.
It rose from a hundred throats at once, it had nothing to do with battle, nothing to do with courage and everything to do with the fact that a monster not seen in over a hundred years was now tearing people apart.
The only sane thing to do was scream.
Men who had stood firm against blade and arrow broke and ran with the high keening wails of children, throwing down their swords and their shields and clawing at one another in their desperation to reach the gate. Some of them did not even run toward the gate. Some of them simply ran in any direction at all that might be away from the thing on the beach.
It bounded after a knot of fleeing men with a throaty growl and came down on top of them with all four limbs at once.
The talons on its hind legs punched through three men in a single impact, the curved black points sinking into their bodies and pinning them to the sand beneath. One of them lived long enough to scream as his ribcage was crushed against the ground.
The dragon's foreclaws came down on a fourth man and tore him apart at the seams, one limb in each direction. Then the long neck snaked down and the jaws closed on a fifth, the head whipped sideways and the man came apart at the waist in a shower of blood and guts that splashed across the dragon's snout and dripped down between its teeth.
Arthur saw all of it in the time it took him to draw a single breath.
He had been frozen for perhaps half a heartbeat when the dragon first hit the beach, his mind refusing to keep pace with what his eyes were seeing, and now the paralysis broke and he began to move. He did not run. There was no point in running. The thing was faster than any man on the beach and any man who turned his back on it was simply choosing the order of his death. He started forward instead, Sunset gripped tight in his right hand, he moved at an angle that would take him across the dragon's flank rather than directly at its head.
A plan was forming in his head.
It was a desperate plan.
It was probably a stupid plan.
But he had killed every other thing he had ever fought and he could not see why this should be any different in principle, if he could just get under the wing where the membrane stretched thin he might be able to put Sunset through its side and reach his heart.
The dragon swung its head and seized another man, the dragon's jaws closed across his torso and bit him completely in half at the chest. The lower half stood for a strange suspended moment on its own legs. Then the legs collapsed in a heap and the dragon swallowed the upper half whole, and the severed arm of the sergeant dropped from between its teeth to land in the sand.
Arthur kept moving.
He could see Llewyn ahead of him. The Dornish prince had turned to run with the rest of the Gold Cloaks and had made it perhaps twenty paces toward the gate before he had stopped. Arthur did not know whether Llewyn had stopped because he had remembered who he was, or because his legs had simply failed him. Whatever the reason the Dornishman now stood frozen in the open sand with his sword still drawn and the dragon coming for him.
The creature had finished with the cluster of men it had pinned and was now moving along the beach, its serpentine head swinging from side to side as it picked targets out of the fleeing crowd, and Llewyn was directly in its path. The dragon had seen him. It was angling its course slightly to take the prince in the next bound, and Llewyn was simply standing there with his sword raised in a feeble high guard that would not have stopped a falling leaf, let alone the open jaws of the thing barreling toward him.
Arthur ran after.
He poured every ounce of speed his body possessed into the few short paces between himself and the prince, his armoured boots throwing up arcs of wet sand behind him, his lungs burning, his vision narrowing to the single point of Llewyn frozen face and the dark shape rushing toward him from the other direction.
He hit Llewyn at full sprint.
His shoulder caught the prince in the centre of his chest and the impact lifted Lewyn clear off his feet and drove him sideways through the air for a good couple of metres before the Dornishman crashed into the sand with a grunt and tumbled away from the dragon's path.
Arthur, having spent his momentum on the shove, was no longer moving forward. He was now standing exactly where Lewyn had been standing. He turned his head and saw the dragons eyes fix on him its mouth open as it moved towards him.
He drew sunset in a high arc and with a roar and slashed across the dragons snout carving a deep gash through it.
*ROAAAAAAARRR*
The dragon reared back as steaming black blood feel from its snout and dropped onto the sand.
"THATS RIGHT! I WONT BE SUCH AN EASY MEAL!!!" Arthur roared as he readied himself for another attack.
However the dragon didn't try to bite him, instead it simply pivoted its enormous body in a single fluid motion and brought its tail whipping around in a horizontal arc that came toward him faster than anything that large had any right to move.
[The World]
He desperately tried to move, but 1.5 seconds wasn't long enough to get clear in time.
The impact was not like being struck by a hammer, that was too generous. It was like being struck by a galloping horse.
The dragon's tail caught him across the chest and the lower ribs in a single crushing blow, and the breastplate that had been forged by the finest armoursmiths in the Crownlands simply caved inward beneath the force of the strike. He felt the steel crumple against his ribs. He felt his ribs crumple against the steel. He felt every ounce of air in his lungs leave him in a single grunt that he did not even hear because the world had gone strangely silent and strangely white at the edges.
He was airborne.
He was airborne for a very long time.
The sky above him spun slowly, the orange firelight, the black smoke and the distant stars rotating around one another. He saw the wall of the city pass beneath him. He saw the silhouettes of archers along the battlements.
Then he came down.
He hit the sand like he'd just been launched from a catapult, but it wasn't finished there, he skipped along the sand like a stone across the lake before finally coming to a stop against one of the numerous dead bodies that filled the beach.
The world went quiet.
The world went dark.
The last thing Arthur registered before the unconsciousness took him was the distant sound of the dragon roaring on the beach.
...
Arthur opened his eyes.
He was standing on the beach.
That was the first thing that struck him as wrong, because he had a very clear memory of being airborne, and a slightly less clear memory of coming down hard on the sand, after that there had been only the silent white edges of the world and the distant sound of the dragon roaring.
He should not be standing.
He should be lying somewhere, broken or dead or both, and yet here he was, upright and on his feet in the middle of the carnage.
He looked down at his hands.
They were his hands. They looked exactly the way his hands always looked, the calluses on the palms from years of farm work and the small white scar across the back of his right knuckle from a fall in Harrowfield when he was twelve.
Except that the firelight from the burning longboats was coming through them. Not strongly, not enough to make him transparent, but enough that the orange glow of the flames behind him passed through his fingers.
He looked down at the sand.
There was a body lying on it about ten feet from where he was standing.
The body was wearing his armour.
The breastplate was caved inward at the centre of the chest, and one of the pauldrons had been torn loose from its straps and was hanging at an awkward angle. The face beneath the open visor of the helm was his face. The eyes were closed. The mouth hung slightly open. A thin trail of dark blood ran from one corner of the lips and disappeared into the sand beneath his cheek.
Arthur stared at himself for a long time.
"Am I dead," he asked the empty air around him. His own voice sounded strange in his ears, distant and slightly muffled, as though he were speaking from inside a closed room while listening from the other side of the wall.
The body on the sand did not answer.
A roar split the night and Arthur's head turned toward it on reflex.
The dragon was still on the beach.
It had moved further inland during whatever stretch of time had passed since the tail strike, and it now stood roughly halfway between the waterline and the city walls, its long neck weaving slowly back and forth as it surveyed the ground around it. The carnage at its feet was indescribable. There were more bodies on the beach now than there had been when Arthur went down, and most of them were no longer recognisable as men.
He looked a little further up and could seee that the Mud Gate was closed.
Someone in command had clearly decided that the risk of the dragon getting inside the walls was worse than the certainty of the men still trapped outside dying. It was a brutal calculation but it was the right one, and Arthur found himself approving of it even if it meant he'd die as well.
Although, he thought, the closing of the gate was not actually going to help very much. The dragon had wings. The walls would not stop it. The walls would slow it down, perhaps, but they would not stop it.
He took a step toward the creature.
The movement was effortless in a way that movement had never been before. There was no resistance from the sand beneath his feet, no weight from his armour pulling at his shoulders, no burn of exhaustion in his thighs. He simply moved, and the distance between himself and the dragon closed faster than it had any right to, the world sliding past him with a smoothness that felt almost like flying. He took another step, and another, and within the span of three strides he had crossed the better part of fifty yards and was standing in the open sand within easy reach of the dragon's flank.
He should have been afraid, but he wasn't.
There was something interesting about being separated from his body. The fear was still there somewhere, he could sense it, but it was coming from very far away.
He moved closer.
The wings were the first thing he noticed properly.
They were torn. Not in the way that a wing might tear from a fall or a fight, but in the way that something would tear if a man with a blade had gone along its length cutting through the membrane. The tears had been made deeply enough to render the wing structurally useless.
The dragon could not fly.
Whoever had brought it here had crippled it deliberately before loading it onto the barge. They had wanted it as a weapon on the beach, not as an aerial threat over the city.
Arthur filed the observation away and kept moving.
He came around to the front of the dragon and stood directly in its path as it reared up over another body and brought its head down to tear loose another mouthful of meat.
He walked into the dragon, though he had meant to walk up to it, perhaps to lay a hand on the scales of its flank, perhaps to look it directly in the eye. Instead his foot came down on the sand where the creature was standing and he simply kept going, and the dragon's body offered no more resistance to his passage than the air had offered to his earlier steps.
He gasped and the world snapped sideways.
He was standing in the dragon now, but not in the dragon's body. He was standing inside a corridor of some kind, a long dim passage that stretched away in both directions into a darkness that he could not see the end of. The walls of the corridor were not walls in any normal sense. They were made of something that looked like flowing red light shot through with thin black veins.
As he looked around he saw a thread. It ran along the centre of the corridor in both directions, a single shimmering line of pale silver-blue light no thicker than a piece of fishing twine, Arthur could see at a glance that it was not natural
The thread was something foreign.
Something that had been put there.
It was not part of the creature.
Arthur reached out, his fingers brushed the thread and the corridor lit up. The thread became a road. The road stretched away into the distance in one direction, leading off through the corridor and out the other side, and Arthur understood in a single intuitive flash what he was seeing. Someone was on the other end of the thread. Someone was holding it. Someone was using it to drive the dragon the way a man might use reins to drive a horse, and now that he had touched it the road ran both ways, and his awareness went rushing along it before he could stop himself.
Oh.
The word formed in his mind without quite being a word, more of a soft surprised exhalation, and then the road ended and he was somewhere else entirely.
He was standing in darkness.
Total darkness. Not the darkness of a moonless night or the darkness of a sealed cellar but the darkness of a place where light had never existed.
"What do we have here..."
A man stood in front of him.
Arthur could not see the man so much as feel the shape of him. He was tall. He was very tall. He was hairless from the top of his great pale head all the way down, and his skin was so white it seemed to give off its own faint radiance in the absolute black of the place around him. He was naked from the waist up, his torso was massive and smooth and entirely without hair, and his arms were thick and corded with muscle that did not look like it belonged on something so pale and so clean. His eyes were small and dark and unblinking, and his mouth was wide and his lips were very thin, and he was smiling.
He was smiling at Arthur.
The smile spread across the lower half of the great pale face like a slow crack opening across the surface of an egg.
"What in the seven hells," Arthur breathed.
The man's smile widened a fraction further. "To think," the voice said, "that someone with such potent magic is hiding in that backwards little kingdom."
Arthur took a step back without meaning to. "I can already imagine what you taste like."
The pale man took a step forward.
Arthur felt for the first time since he had stepped out of his own body something that was very much like fear.
The man took another step.
"Stay back," Arthur said. His voice came out rougher than he intended.
The man smiled wider.
"Stay back."
The pale man did not stay back. He took another step, and his great smooth hand began to lift toward Arthur's face.
"STAY BACK!"
Something tore loose inside Arthur's chest.
He did not know what he was doing. He did not know where it came from or how he had reached for it or what he had reached for. He only knew that one moment he was standing in the dark with a thing's hand reaching for his face, and the next moment something inside him roared outward in a single explosive pulse, a wave of pure white that punched through the air around him and slammed into the pale man.
The man was thrown backward.
His great smooth body lifted off whatever surface it was standing on and went tumbling away into the darkness, and the smile finally fell away from his face, but what replaced it was not anger. What replaced it was something far worse. Something like delight.
The thread snapped.
Arthur could feel it part somewhere far away, the silver-blue line that had connected the dragon's mind to the man's, and the corridor and the darkness and the smiling pale figure all began to fall away from him at once. He was falling. He was being pulled. The road that had carried him here was reversing under his feet at a speed that left him no time to brace, and the dragon's mind whipped past him in a blur of red and black, and the beach rushed up beneath him, and his body—
Pain.
All of it. All at once. Every ounce of it.
Someone was shaking him.
"Arthur. Arthur. Arthur. Ser Arthur, please, please, please be alive, please, oh gods, oh gods—"
Arthur's eyes opened a slit and the world filtered back in as a smear of orange firelight and a face hovering above him that he could not at first make sense of. The face was streaked with dirt and blood, and there was a deep cut along the line of the jaw, after a long moment Arthur recognised them as Llewyn's.
He coughed and a thick warm spurt of blood came up out of his throat and ran down his chin and into the collar of his gambeson. The pain that exploded through his chest as he coughed was so extreme that he very nearly lost consciousness again, and a thin grey film closed over his vision before reluctantly peeling back.
"Oh thank the gods," Llewyn breathed. The Dornish prince had one hand under Arthur's shoulder and the other against the side of his face. "You're alive... You're alive!!! I thought you were dead, Arthur, I thought I was looking at a corpse, I had to... just stay still, do not move, where are you hurt, where is the worst of it—"
"Ribs," Arthur rasped.
The word came out as a wet broken whisper and it was followed almost immediately by another cough that brought up more blood. He could feel the broken edges of his ribs grinding against one another every time he tried to draw breath,
"I need to get you up, I need to get you back behind the walls, but the gate is closed, wnd the dragon is still out there but it is not, it is not chasing anymore, it is just, gods, it is just eating, I do not know what happened, I thought you were dead, I am so sorry, Arthur, I should have stood with you, I should not have frozen, I—"
"Llewyn." Arthur lifted one shaking hand and tapped weakly at the centre of his own breastplate.
It took Llewyn a long stupid moment to understand. The Dornishman's face went through three different shapes before comprehension finally arrived, and then he was scrambling at the buckles and straps of Arthur's armour with hands that shook badly enough to fumble at every clasp.
Arthur tried to help and managed only to lift his head a few inches off the sand before the pain forced it back down. Llewyn worked the straps free at the side and at the shoulders and at the neck, and when the breastplate finally came away from Arthur's torso the prince hissed sharply at what he saw beneath it.
The gambeson over Arthur's chest was soaked through.
Blood had pooled in the padding and was now spreading outward in a dark stain that ran down both sides of his ribs and into the sand beneath him. The flesh under the gambeson was already beginning to swell and the bruising had started to bloom in deep purple-black blotches. Llewyn started to peel the gambeson away as well and Arthur made a small pained sound and shook his head.
Free of the breastplate, Arthur could finally draw a breath that was a little deeper than the last.
[Hamon]
He reached for it the way a drowning man reaches for the surface, and the warm golden current that lived in his blood answered. He began to breathe with it, and the energy began to flow through his body. He combined this with [Novocaine] which allowed him to dull the worst of the pain while holding his body together and hopefully healing the worst of the damage. After a long stretch of focused breathing he was able to draw a breath that was almost normal.
Faint golden sparks were drifting off his skin.
Llewyn had backed up half a pace and was staring at him with a face full of wonder. "Arthur," the prince said carefully. "What is happening to your body."
"It's fine," Arthur said. His voice was still rough but it was no longer a wet ruin, and he managed something that was almost a smile. "It is just something I learned. Don't worry about it."
"You are glowing."
"Llewyn. It is fine."
The prince closed his mouth and visibly chose to set the question aside for later.
Arthur pushed himself up onto one elbow, then onto a sitting position, and finally with Llewyn's help to his feet. Each step of the process was its own small agony, but the [Hamon] held him together and [Novocaine] kept the worst of the pain banked behind the warm wall, and after a long swaying moment he found his balance.
He looked out across the beach. The dragon was still there. It had moved further down the shoreline now, toward a section of the beach where a cluster of bodies had piled up against a stretch of rocks, and it was working its way through them. It was no longer hunting. It was no longer attacking. Whatever connection had been driving it forward had been severed when Arthur had thrown the man back in the dark, and without that hand on the reins the creature seemed content to simply feed on what was already dead.
Arthur put two fingers between his teeth and whistled.
There was a pause.
Then Quiet emerged from the shadows of an alley somewhere on the far side of the wall, Arthur did not quite understand how the animal had got from inside the wall to outside of it but he had long since stopped trying to understand Quiet. The horse trotted across the sand toward him and came to a halt at his side.
Llewyn was staring at the horse now.
Llewyn's day was, Arthur reflected, going to require a great deal of explaining at some later point.
"Arthur," Llewyn said. "Listen to me. We need to leave. Right now. There is a second wave coming. I saw the boats while you were down. There must be five hundred more men loading into longboats out there, and once they hit the beach we are not going to be fighting one dragon anymore, we are going to be fighting one dragon and five hundred soldiers, we are out here with no support and the gate is closed we are going to die. We need to get back over the wall somehow, we need to rally the men inside, we need to—"
"Rally them, Llewyn."
The prince stopped.
"What."
"Go," Arthur said. He reached down and picked up Sunset where it had been lying in the sand beside his fallen body. The hilt felt enormously heavy in his hand for a moment and then, as the Hamon flowed into his arm, settled back to its proper weight. "Rally the men inside the city. Get every able-bodied soldier we have into formation and prepare them for the second wave."
"What are you going to be doing?"
Arthur did not answer.
He took a breath that was deeper than any he had managed in the last quarter of an hour, swung himself up into Quiet's saddle in a single grunting effort, and settled into the seat with Sunset balanced across his thighs.
He reached out with his mind.
*Horus*
The connection to the falcon had been quiet at the back of his awareness all evening, and when Arthur reached for it the falcon answered immediately.
*The dragon. Distract it. Now*
A piercing screech split the night sky high overhead.
Llewyn's head snapped upward. So did Arthur's. So did, almost lazily, the dragon's.
Horus came down out of the darkness like a piece of the sky breaking off and falling. The falcon was the size of a man's torso when fully extended in the dive, his dark brown and white feathers laid flat against the wind for maximum speed, and the speed at which he descended was something out of a fever dream. Arthur had seen falcons stoop on prey before. He had never seen anything like this. Horus came down in a near-vertical line that cut through the smoke and the firelight and the rising heat from the burning ships, and he hit the dragon in the side of the head
*ROAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRR*
The dragons great wedge-shaped head whipped around to find the source of the impact, but Horus was already gone. The falcon had pulled out of the dive at the last possible second and was now climbing back into the air m, and as the dragon's head rose to track him Horus opened his beak and screeched again and a lance of pale blue ice shot down out of the sky and shattered against the dragon's snout in a spray of frost and crystal.
The dragon roared a second time and lashed at the air with its head. Horus rolled effortlessly out of reach, climbing higher, and came back down for a second pass.
The dragon was no longer interested in the bodies on the beach. It was no longer interested in the gate, or the walls, or the city beyond. Its full attention was now fixed on the small infuriating thing that kept screeching down out of the sky and striking it.
As Horus completed his second pass and pulled away again the dragon reared up onto its hind legs and roared up at the night sky with all of its rage.
Arthur dug his heels into Quiet's flanks and the pale horse exploded into a gallop beneath him. There was no warm-up trot, no easy canter. Quiet went from a standstill to a full gallop in the space of two strides, and the beach was suddenly rushing past beneath them.
Arthur leaned along the horse's neck, Sunset gripped tight in his right hand, Quiet cleared the distance between them and the dragon at a speed that no normal horse could have produced.
The dragon was still rearing up, its attention fixed on Horus high overhead, when Arthur and Quiet reached its flank. Arthur kicked his feet free of the stirrups, gathered every ounce of strength he had left, and jumped. He went up off Quiet's back in a single explosive lunge that very nearly tore something further loose in his ribs, he went up high, and came down on the dragon's back with an impact that drove the air out of his lungs all over again.
He landed flat against the scales and immediately began to slide, he flexed his wrist wnd the hidden blade shot out of its housing along his forearm and punched downward into the scales beneath his arm, and he locked himself in place.
If the dragon hadn't felt him land then it certainly had now. It came down off its hind legs with a crash that nearly threw him clear, and then it began to thrash.
It did not thrash like an animal. It thrashed like an earthquake. The whole massive body bucked and twisted and rolled, the long neck whipping back and forth as the head tried to reach him, the ruined wings flaring and flapping uselessly, the entire creature trying to dislodge the small thing that had attached itself to its back.
Arthur was thrown about so violently that the world became a kaleidoscope of dark sky and orange flame and grey scales and his own boots pinwheeling above him as the dragon reared and twisted beneath him.
He almost lost his grip three separate times. The first time the dragon spun in a circle and the force ripped his right hand away from the spines on its back entirely, only the hidden blade buried in the dragon's flesh kept him from being flung off.
He hung from the blade by his left arm for a terrifying second before he could swing his right arm back up and catch the horn again.
The second time the dragon went up onto its hind legs and slammed itself down sideways onto the sand, attempting to crush him beneath its own bulk, and Arthur had to release it and haul himself bodily up the side of the creature's body to keep his torso clear of the impact zone.
The third time the dragon's head whipped around and the jaws came snapping toward him with a speed he had not expected the long neck to be capable of, the teeth closed on the empty air an inch from his face as he ducked sideways.
Luckily Horus came down again.
The falcon hit the dragon in the eye.
It was a glancing blow. Horus did not have the body weight to do real damage to something that size, but the impact and the cold burst of ice that accompanied it caused the dragon to flinch, just for a fraction of a second, and the head reared back and the long neck stretched upward as the dragon turned its full attention skyward at the falcon. For one brief moment, the dragon's neck was straight.
The skull was directly above Arthur.
He saw the line. He saw the soft place at the base of the skull where the scales thinned and the bone lay close beneath the surface. He saw the angle. He saw the trajectory. He had perhaps half a heartbeat to make the choice.
He retracted his hidden blade and pushed upward off the dragon's back with his legs and his good arm.
He came down on top of the dragon's neck just behind the skull, and he drove Sunset point-first into the soft place at the base of the head with every ounce of strength his body had left.
The blade went in to the hilt. It punched through the scales and through the skin and through the muscle and through the bone, and it kept going until the crossguard struck the back of the dragon's skull, and Sunset's point emerged on the other side of the head in a fountain of dark blood that sprayed out across the beach.
The dragon stopped. It did not stagger. It did not collapse slowly. It simply stopped, every muscle in its body locking up at once, and the great head dropped forward onto the sand with a thud that Arthur felt in his teeth, the body folded sideways under its own weight and crashed down onto the beach in a final shuddering heap that sent up a small cloud of bloody sand.
Arthur rode it down snd crouched on the back of the dying creature as it collapsed, Sunset still buried to the hilt in the base of its skull, and when the body finally settled he straightened up to his full height with one boot planted on either side of the spine, and he wrenched Sunset free of the bone with both hands and lifted it high above his head and he roared.
"RAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!"
The beach went silent.
The Gold Cloaks on the battlements above had been shouting and cursing and praying through every minute of the dragon's rampage, and now they all simply stopped, every one of them, and stared down at the small armoured figure standing on top of the impossible thing they had all been certain was about to kill them.
Llewyn stood on the sand below. The Dornish prince's face was tilted upward and his mouth was open, his sword hung forgotten from his hand at his side, and he was staring at Arthur with an expression of pure unadulterated awe.
A single voice broke the silence from the wall above.
"Pendragon."
Arthur turned his head slowly.
Another voice took it up.
"Pendragon."
A third joined in.
"PENDRAGON."
And then the whole wall erupted.
The Gold Cloaks pounded their fists against the stones and beat their bows against the wall and screamed his name into the night, and Llewyn on the sand below threw back his head and laughed a broken laugh and joined the chant, and the name went up and up and up.
PENDRAGON. PENDRAGON. PENDRAGON.
"RAAAAAAAHHH!!!"
The cheering died in a strangled gasp.
Everyone looked to where the shouting had come from and saw that the second wave had come. Arthur turned his head and saw them, hundreds of them, longboats grinding up onto the sand all along the curve of the beach with men spilling out of them by the score.
He had no strength left.
He swayed on top of the dragon's body with Sunset hanging loose in his hand, he could not lift it again. He could not climb down. He could not run. He could not even stand much longer. He couldn't breathe properly enough to use [Hamon] and [Novocaine] was about to run out too.
It was over.
It was over...
"I'm sorry... Mira... Cassie."
*BOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAH*
A horn blew out across the beach, but it was not a horn from the bay. It was not a horn from the city. It was a horn from the land beyond the walls, from the road that led south out of the city, from somewhere across the open ground past the harbour district, and it was followed by another horn and another and another, and then by the unmistakable sound of hundreds of hooves hitting hard-packed earth at full gallop.
At first Arthur could not at first make sense of what he was seeing. Then his eyes found the banners, and he understood. Stokeworth. Rosby. Hayford. Duskendale. The local lords had answered Duncan's ravens, and they had answered fast, they were coming in and charging against the second wave.
The cavalry hit the second wave from behind.
Needless to say the collision was not a battle. It was a butchery. Hundreds of horsemen smashed into the disorganised mass of soldiers who had just landed on the beach, and the soldiers, who had been expecting to slaughter a hundred soldiers and had not been prepared to defend against an attack from their rear, simply broke.
They broke immediately and they broke completely, the riders rode them dow, and within a span of minutes the second wave was nothing but a scattered mob of men running in every direction along the shoreline with horsemen riding them down one by one.
Arthur watched it for a long moment.
Then his legs gave out.
He sank down onto his knees on top of the dragon's head, and from his knees he sank further, and Sunset slipped from his fingers and clattered against the scales beside him, he then toppled forward across the dead creature's neck with his cheek pressed against the cooling scales and his breath coming in thin shallow gasps.
The last thing he saw before the dark took him was Llewyn running toward him across the bloody sand.
(AN: I'm sure some of our more well read people will know who the man that Arthur saw was. Also if any of you were confused what happened to Arthur was just another application of the Shining. But yeah Arthur has killed a 'dragon' and Kings Landing has been successfully defended. Anyway hope you enjoyed it.)
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